Hills of Hayward

I came across a disturbing editorial today, and I wonder why the TV news does not surface this. Maybe news on TV is so hand-cuffed by being politically correct, that it cannot report this type of news without appearing politically biased. Regardless, you judge for yourself what your opinion on the matter is. I quote from the newspaper editorial:

It’s sort of like issuing a preemptive pardon to everyone in the Bush administration, even though no one has yet been charged with any crime.

A Supreme Court ruling in June raised a possibility that charges or civil suits could be filed. The court found that the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo violated the Geneva Conventions. A U.S. law, the War Crimes Act, makes it a felony to violate the conventions, leading some scholars to suggest members of the administration might be in legal jeopardy.

The proposed legislation in Congress would preclude that. It would also prohibit detainees from using the regular courts to challenge the legitimacy of their detention. It’s a Get Out of Jail Free card, just in case members of the administration might need it.

I finally pulled these photos of my parents-in-law out of our Canon SLR this weekend. The negative thing about having a huge Compact Flash card is that you can put off organizing your pictures until a long time has passed. In this case, five whole months.

My parents-in-law visited this spring of 2006. It is the only time of year when the rains come, and the hills of northern California are green with grass. We happened to take a hike that night through Garin Regional Park right before sunset. This park is about a mile away from home, and right in back of my little uncle’s house.

Click here to see the photo album

I went back home this week to where I attended middle school and high school to see my sister. It is like I stepped back into an alternate universe, the closer I got to home the more powerful my recollections and complex feelings of a time gone by. Like magnetic waves or the ticking of a hypnotist’ clock, the closer you get the more the feeling of being inexorably drawn to an “old place”.

That our family home was in need of a makeover and the typical dreary Washington weather supported my feeling like I was walking in an old world. There was moss growing on the driveway and roof, the paint was becoming chipped and worn, and the raspberry bushes in the back grow like the mythical walls of thorns and roses in “Sleeping Beauty”.

This “old place” is where my sister sees comfort and familiarity, but what do I see in it? My feelings are mixed, muted, and masked. As I was driving back to SeaTac Airport, I heard a song on the radio that felt right. The song was “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol, I definitely need to get this album.

Paul shared this little gem of a cartoon with me. I am sure Isamu will think the same thing once he gets older.

To the Editor:

Re “In Prime-Time Address, Bush Says Safety of U.S. Hinges on Iraq” (news article, Sept. 12):

As one of the thousands of people who were in the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, and experienced firsthand the horrors of that day, I never thought that five years later it would come to this.

Immediately after the attack, a vast majority of Americans and the world were united around a common cause to capture and punish the people responsible.

For the short time between Sept. 11 and the first inklings of an attack on Iraq, a country that did not attack us, I was encouraged by our progress in Afghanistan: our government would honor those who died by uniting the world and dispensing justice.

The president’s own speech on Monday night outlined, in the starkest terms, the magnitude of the administration’s failure.

According to President Bush, the United States and the rest of the world are now locked in ideological warfare for decades to come that includes weapons of mass destruction with no mutually assured destruction mechanism as a deterrent.

Is there any possible worse outcome?

Americans have to wake up and realize that there are alternatives to the future the president described. This has to start with the coming election. Only Americans, with their power to vote, can alter the future our president has put before us.

Bill DeLorenzo
Basking Ridge, N.J., Sept. 12, 2006

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